Ice Dance
by Coraline's3
Summary: Edward was real. And Alice knows it, but she is unsure of whether or not to visit the mansion on the hill for fear of rekindling old wounds that had never truly healed in her neighborhood. And if she does, will she regret it?


It's been quite a long time since I've started a new story. This one has taken me seven years to put into words. I hope, after my absence, all of my faithful readers will find this story just as enchanting as Brenna and Commodore Norrington. Tell me what you think.

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><p>The story I am about to tell does not even begin in my time. It does not even begin in my mother's time. It begins with my grandmother.<p>

I don't remember much about my grandmother. In fact, I hardly knew her. As a tiny girl she would tell me stories of the mansion on the hill. The fire would be lit, the snow would be falling swiftly outside, and she would always begin by saying she would tell her story another night. I would beg her in my little girl voice, waiting for the moment she'd sit in the chair and speak to me of a past no one repeated. The fire danced in her glasses, the warmth of the bedroom enveloped us.

Her story was about a man with scissors for hands. It was about how he came to live with her family, how he learned about the world, and how she came to love him. I was always confused because she regarded my grandfather so highly. Her love for him was unlike any other I had ever seen—and yet, when she spoke of Edward Scissorhands, her body melted into a memory I often tried desperately to follow. The love she had for him was unearthly, untouchable.

"You still could go." I would inform her, knowing she probably had intended to before.

She smiled weakly, and protested. She didn't want him to see her so old.

I grew up to look like her, only with slightly different features. I never thought we would even have the same personalities, but it turned out that we did—only at times, however. When I turned thirteen and started having my period, she hardly spoke to me of the man with scissors for hands. When I confronted my mother about this, she said it was because Grandma Kim felt I was in love with her Edward. And then my mother would sigh and wave off the thought like it was nothing. To me, however, it was a paralyzing notion.

Soon afterwards, she became hospitalized. We often went to see her, the family and I. And sometimes I would be left alone with her.

She would stare out the windows of her assigned room, not even realizing I was with her. I had always been her favorite, and even if she chose to ignore me, I knew she still loved me. I knew, somewhere in her fragile bones, she wanted me to believe in the tales she wove into my head as a child.

"Please, grandma," I would begin, "tell me the story. Tell me about Edward."

She would shake her head. She didn't even have enough water in her system to cry but the tears were clearly there. My grandmother would moan out in pain and often times whisper his name. No one else in the family understood what she was saying except for me. That was when I realized she had told no one else in the family of her story, apart from mom who was too adult to admit he existed.

In her will, grandmother left me her trunk. I barricaded my door so that no one could enter to see what treasures she had left me. Upon first inspection, it seemed that all of the things were of not much interest. Old family photos, birth and death certificates. Crushed flowers from weddings past and funerals of ancestors I had never met. There was a locket of hair, red gold, like mine. A string of pearls. Love letters from my grandpa to grandma during Vietnam.

And then there was a smaller box. I tried the key to the box, but it would not open. For several years I searched for the key. I tore apart the house, the garage, the garden. The search was my hidden obsession. I poured over grandma's room hoping that I might find the key.

Finally, on my sixteenth birthday, mom presented me with an envelope.

"Grandma Kim told me to wait until you were almost an adult to give it to you." She turned to leave me, but then swung back on her heel. "I wouldn't get too excited. It's just an old key." The door shut firmly behind her.

I was already throwing clothes off the top of the trunk and shuffling through all of my grandmother's things. My hands shook, my forehead was breaking out in sweat. I could feel my heart thumping. I knew that whatever was in the box was extremely important. Whatever was in it held my destiny, as corny as that sounded.

I pressed the key into the hole. It clicked. And clicked, and sprang open.

Inside, on top of everything, cobwebs wrapped around the rusting metal, was what appeared to be a claw of scissors. It was the hand of Edward Scissorhands—or what might have been. Grandma wouldn't have brought back his hand. It must have been the one she used to ward off the neighbors from going into the mansion and killing Edward themselves in the end.

The next item was a white dress, wrapped up so tightly that the creases were forever embedded into the silk material. It was out of fashion, out of date, out of the world I lived in. But I loved it because it was the dress she wore when she last saw him. There was still blood on the shoulder of the dress, browned and caked on without any sign of it trying to be cleaned.

There were two more items. An unopened envelope addressed to me in a feminine scrawl, and a picture. My heart stopped at the sight of it. There was my grandmother, her mother and father, her brother, and an obscure figure. He was dressed in what seemed to be a white shirt, gray dress pants, and suspenders. The clothes were too large for him. His hair was all sorts of confused, standing up in various lengths. Long strips of metal were attached to his wrists where hands should have been.

It was him. It was Edward. And he was the most wonderful thing my eyes had beheld. At last, a shred of proof. Evidence that a man I had grown up with invariably existed. Edward Scissorhands was alive. I looked up out my window which held a lovely view of the mansion on the hill. An infinitesimal light twinkle at the top of the tower. I would have thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me had it been any night before this—before opening my grandmother's box. But I knew with strong conviction that Edward lived. And I was going to go find him.


End file.
